People think Florida has no clay—just sand, sea, and retirees. They imagine the land as an endless strip mall of stucco and shell rock. But underneath the new housing developments and golf courses, there are veins of clay—often gray, sandy, densely packed and somewhat elusive. They hide in creek beds, drainage ditches, construction sites, and rare patches of undeveloped shoreline like secrets the land only tells to those who ask with their hands.
A clay pit in Ocala National Forest. Alt text: Small cliffs of mostly orange earth with patches of white showing vertical markings from cranes that excavate the clay soil for construction projects. There is clear water standing at the bottom of the mine.
When I first started working with wild Florida clays, I wasn’t trying to understand geology. I was mostly led by the novelty of finding clay in nature and the curiosity that followed. But as I processed this earth—coarse, low-clay, silty stuff with occasional fossils—I started learning things the land wasn’t saying outright. It spoke through texture, through what it could or couldn’t hold, through the way the clay split under heat.
I've written about my explorations turning wild clay into terra sigllata, which I mostly fire to midrange temperatures. A lot of the Florida clay I’ve worked with makes a terra sigillata that crackles when fired—a fragmented, dry shimmer across the surface of the pot. The cracks have a beautifully raw quality, like a dried lake bed or elephant skin. They’ve come to feel like a map of this place: a visual echo of our fractured geology, our sinkhole-prone foundation, our porous aquifers and eroding coasts. The fragility of the sig surface mirrors the fragility of the land itself.
It also mirrors the fragmentation happening above ground. Across Florida, unchecked development is breaking up wildlife corridors and turning once-contiguous habitats into isolated pockets. Roads, subdivisions, and shopping centers slice through ecosystems, leaving panthers, scrub jays, and even pollinators struggling to move, mate, or migrate. The fragmented surface of the terra sigillata becomes a kind of visual metaphor—each crack a scar left by human expansion, a reminder that the more we divide the landscape, the more we destabilize the life that depends on it.
These results are unlike any I’ve gotten from clay elsewhere. When I worked with wild clay recently in Roanoke, Virginia, the sigillata was silky and more uniform—rich in iron, stable, predictable. In New Mexico, the colors shifted toward greens and rusts, and the sig held tighter to the surface, vitrifying smoothly without fragmentation. I have samples from Alabama, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and more that all behave in predictable ways, giving results that have been easy to incorporate into my body of work. But in Florida, even clays that start out gray or orange end up firing to a soft, off-white or pale yellow, often cracking open like old paint. It’s not a flaw; it’s a fingerprint—something the land is telling me about its own past and its mineral memory.
Jars of terra sigillata made from clays from Tennessee, New Mexico, Louisiana and Puerto Rico, all showing a similar dark iron-red color with a soft satin sheen that is the hallmark look of sig. The sample on the far right is from the shore of Sarasota Bay and is the only instance of a smooth, iron-red sig I've found in Florida so far.
Making terra sigillata is one of my favorite ways to learn about wild clay. It distills the material down to its finest particles—its essence—and reveals qualities you might not see in a full-bodied clay form. You learn about its components due to how it settles, what kind of sheen it produces, what color it wants to be, and how it behaves under heat. Every step of the process teaches you something: the way it separates in water, the slip’s texture on your fingers, the way it tightens or resists on a surface, even the viscosity of the sig itself. For me, this close observation becomes a kind of intimacy. The land reveals itself slowly, but honestly, when you pay that kind of attention.
It’s ironic, then, that one of the most widely used processed clays in studio pottery—EPK, or Edgar Plastic Kaolin—is mined right here in Florida, in Putnam County. The region is also known for its industrial sand production, and silica is often extracted alongside the kaolin. That alone speaks volumes: Florida’s soils are quartz-rich and clay-poor, commercially valued more for their sand than for their plasticity. Even our most well-known commercial clay shares space with silica extraction—a reminder of how marginal and precious true clay is in this landscape, and how remarkable it is to find any at all.
My favorite result is from a clay I collected in Ocala National Forest, a sandy white clay , full of quartz with traces of iron and probably also magnesium, judging by the result, which in the ceramics world is referred to as a crawl effect. When fired, the sig makes a pearly, cracked surface, with the color ranging from bone white to a golden light tan depending on what temperature it’s fired to. It reminds me that Florida’s coarse sandy soil is actually quartz, worn down over millions of years from the Appalachian Mountains. And beneath that? Limestone, made from ancient marine life. A giant bone yard. This peninsula was once part of Gondwana, attached to what’s now West Africa. So when I dig clay here, I’m touching a piece of ancestral drift, a foreign land that’s long since naturalized, but still remembers.
Three examples of terra siglliata made with Florida clays from Central and coastal North Florida. Each one has a different size crackle matrix from bold to fine.
Florida is strange—but not just in the meme-able “Florida Man” sense. It’s geologically unique, home to the largest concentration of magically clear, blue freshwater springs on Earth. It’s spiritually strange, too. While national headlines fixate on MAGA politics, people forget that Florida is also full of new age beach hippies. I’ve heard more than one person insist that Sarasota is a star gate portal. And my town in particular is circus strange. About half a mile from my house, there are tiny old homes with unusually low doorways—built for the little people who performed with the Ringling Brothers Circus when it wintered here. The land still holds the residue of showbiz, spectacle, and disappearance. And in some places, deep underneath, it holds clay.
A couple of years ago, I formed a relationship with a state-run institution to exchange my clay samples for data. My samples would help them with their research and, in return, I would receive chemical analyses to help me learn more about the clay I was finding. Unfortunately, the raw data I received was odd—from inexplicably high argon and chlorine content to missing elements like magnesium and sodium. I had them test a clay that was light orange in color before firing and pale yellow to off-white when fired to cone 5. According to the data sheet, this clay had very high iron content, but high-iron clays typically fire to some variation of orange or reddish brown. I just couldn't align the data with my experience working with the clay. Fortunately, I had access to an expert who confirmed my observations. A ceramic engineer I reached out to, Dr. Bill Carty, explained that the scan I’d received was likely flawed—an uncorrected XRF analysis not meant for complex materials like clay. He reminded me that XRF, while useful in some contexts like painting conservation, often struggles to yield reliable results for ceramics unless performed under very specific and controlled conditions.
That experience ended up reinforcing something I was already beginning to believe: my own senses—touch, observation, and experience in the kiln—were proving more reliable than scientific data that didn’t seem to match what I was seeing. Over time, I’ve come to attribute the strange results of my Florida sigillata to the clay’s naturally high silica content, the likely presence of magnesium, and the behavior of montmorillonite clays common in Florida soils. The inches of fine sand at the bottom of my terra sigillata solution and its often gel-like quality, its unwillingness to fit uniformly over my clay body—all of these observations have taught me more than a spreadsheet ever could. It was a reminder that not everything needs to be quantified to be understood.
I've also looked to our Indigenous history for clues about our clay. Some say the Calusa, who congregated in Sarasota seasonally, did not have a clay culture, but that’s not quite right. Their material culture was adapted to a coastal life—shell mounds, wooden tools, fishing technologies—and in regions where high-quality clay was scarce, pottery wasn’t always the center. Seashells, which are abundant along the coast, serve as natural tools and utensils. It reminds me that clay is not just a given. It’s a gift, and its presence or absence shapes culture, architecture, food storage, fire. The Calusa did make their own pottery and had to innovate unique ways to make up for the limited workability of South Florida clay by adding cattail fluff and sea sponge. However, the archaeological record shows that they often traded for higher quality pottery from other parts of Florida. Of the pots that were made by Indigenous South Floridians, mostly shards remain. The pots were so fragile that finding pots intact is extremely rare. A great source of information about our Indigenous ceramic history can be found through the University of Florida Museum pottery types gallery.
This is a clay sample collected from Ten Thousand Islands off the coast of Naples, Florida. It's a funky marine clay that was unpleasant to process. The circle on the left is unfired, the sample on the left is fired. This gray to off-white transformation is a common result, one I've gotten from different clays collected from Central to South Florida.
Working with Florida clay has made me pay attention in a way I never had to with commercial materials. With wild clay, you have to embrace the weirdness and unpredictability —the cracking, the refusal to vitrify, the nasty odor of organic decay. The clay tells you how it wants to be worked with, how it needs to be amended, how hot to fire it.
In forming a relationship with the material, you get something deeper than mastery. You get intimacy. You get a conversation with the land itself, one that bypasses language and goes straight to touch. I don’t know if that kind of relationship can heal the planet—at least not in a world where governments and corporations still prioritize profit over the health of the environment. But I do believe that building a more intimate connection with the earth is personally transformative. It brings us into deeper alignment with the rest of creation, and that kind of transformation has its own quiet power. It may not overturn systems overnight, but it changes the way we live, make, consume, and relate—and that shift matters.
In a state famous for political spectacle, the land still tells the truth—if you listen. Florida’s clay isn’t easy. It’s not abundant. But it’s here. And it’s trying to speak.
